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Superficial garbage and just a bunch of shock-jock reporting crap again. Forget whatever 'security experts' were brought on, I would have been thoroughly entertained to see an official 'Hackers' reunion with Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie and alike giving in-character input and play-by-play, then end the segment with "Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything"

I read Matt's blog posting and I do have to say it sounds like his underlying issue is less of a quandary with a code renaissance being over and more of the drowning complexy and exhaustion involved with today's changing technology world from a code slingers perspective. Reading his blurb touching on a few profound things I find myself doing more and more as I get older in the tech industry: enjoying the simplicity of hacking shell or automative code in a text editor without launching an IDE, still having algorithmic thought processes and approaches, documenting less and thinking more. It sounds like his interests have just shifted and probably for the better. There's tons of shit that I look at on my shelves: projects started, topics heavily bookmarked in myriad of O'reilly books, half-finished circuit design on breadboards, code lying around here or there. It's just that: what was important now isn't and you're trying to just simplify the black hole of tech that was once an intriguing and mind-blowing ordeal.

Although I appreciate the changes in the B+ model and board layout changes, it does kind of suck that the natural improvement evolution of the Raspberry Pi is wiping out the 'coolness' I have with the three (what seems to feel like) aging Raspberry Pi original model B's (256MB version) I own from back in ~2011 into early 2012.

I'm still trying to appreciate them for what they are, so I'll still get the mileage out of them. $35 isn't a high price tag, but to upgrade 'X' of them all to chase small features is going to create very unstable 12oz beer bottle coasters over time with little used market re-coup costs.

Horrible assumption that you think developers are top-dogs, Jeff. I've seen many cases were DevOps role FAILED for competent developers because, in the cases I've seen, this is true:

* Your smartest developer may be just that when it comes to language, software architecture and platform development, but their operating system, networking, hardware infrastructure knowledge + background is not even hobby-shop at best.

* They've always had an ops or engineering crew to throw their code at, figure out how to integrate it, and NEVER had to support it.

* Ego problems thinking they are 'above' remedial automation --- which most of the time doesn't involve a real development language, just scripting.

Out of those two things alone, I've always heard the: "Well we need a sys-admin/engineer now because we are spending more time trying to manage systems, not really sure how or what to automate, and it's really taking time away from me getting back to the kind of development I, as the developer want to do." Which is the polar opposite of the two points I mentioned above.

The only thing criminal about this is what he's being charged with from a federal law perspective; his actions were just that: stupid. He was going to gain perhaps 24 more hours of study time to get out of a final exam. Using tor was a good idea until you originate it on a campus network --- someone who knew just enough to be microscopically dangerous on the internet. If articles are being written to use tor to make my personal activities on the internet harder for the NSA to correlate, it's gotta be the one-and-only tool right?

Leave your smart phone at the dorm, give your student ID to a conspirator and have them badge you in at the library, use a laptop you temporarily bought at Walmart 2 weeks ago (which has an excellent return policy within 15 days opened or not), then take a taxi (or walk) down to a local area with free wifi (outside a budget hotel, coffee house or there are still dinks who have open APs), use a fake mac address, and do what you need to do. Kid criminals these days.

I'm sure some slashdotter will bullet-hole that remark, but for making a digital bomb thread 'these days' I'd say you have to at least do that if you were on such a mission to do so. What happened to the "my immediate family member is suddenly ill? I must go see them for a day" excuse? I've never used that personally, but surely you start small and don't play the final ace right away.

Man, I am so sick of this 're-birth' crap from Fedora. I liked Fedora 'core' back 7+ years ago before we had to be this uber bleeding edge -slash- agile uber aggressive build cycle that fucks everything up and obsoletes distribution usage to about 6 months.

When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future, I was totally cool with that, and it melded nicely in a lot of environments. But that spin-off has become such a damn mess now with developer heavy ideas that, in some case, go against every foundation of a traditional UNIX-like operating system design, I could really give who shits what the do now.

Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything. You'll never get that right, and some 'next-in-line' guy they give 5 minutes of talk time at the next conference will say the same thing.

When you take shit, and try and re-invent it with only shit, I'm sure everyone knows the result you get.

Geeks.com (or compgeeks.com which is where I initially discovered them back in circa '98) is/was totally awesome. I bought new or refurbished from them and never had a problem at all. It was one of those 'shop-all' places for yester-new hardware, which IMHO, holds ALOT of merit against shops like newegg and a like today that only house 'latest-and-greatest' and have a pretty short shelf life for old tech. If I needed to find a CPU type to max out an old motherboard to give it's last 'spark' of useful life, or some obscure bargain-basement item that was worth the handful of dollars to try out, it was perfect. It was one of those places you could definitely depend on having that 'focused' item you were looking for in the end-consumer PC hardware market.

Couldn't agree more. I do prefer online purchasing for those very reasons myself. I think it also comes down to simply getting the 'best' deal, and if that's brick-and-mortar or online with 2-day S&H, that's what it is. I think there's also some convenience in there, too, especially if there's something you want. It's all what you are willing to pay for that item you want, need or can't live without. I know it's not going to break the bank for me to pay the 5-7% sales tax on items online, I just hope that the prices online still stay competitive and don't stick it to the consumer, otherwise it honestly won't make a bit of difference to me anymore.

All in all, I'm indifferent on the sales tax dilemma and I've came to the conclusion that this internet place isn't really a fun place anymore...

Of course, he has an economic interest in getting people to use MariaDB. Hard to argue that Oracle isn't evil though.

Sure, OP. Oracle isn't evil. Right. That's like saying The sky isn't blue or the grass isn't green. I think it's fair to say they have a VERY bottom line approach to business. Their stove-pipe approach to support when it comes to lock-in on hardware and ugly software models and support for Oracle DB, IM, Oracle Solaris (and Linux), and being purely selfish with ZFS is just nauseating anymore.

Absorbing MySQL, and pretty much train wrecked it, then having OSS community and founders of MySQL during it's infancy peak time forked over to create MariaDB just shows you the potential that MySQL had and Oracle failed at.

It sounds to me like you're trying to sell them on how 'well rounded' and 'IT-intelligent' you are versus actually knowing the business you were for that your IT department supports to make the business successful. If you want to get them comfortable, then perhaps you are the one that needs to be educated in 'suit/business talk'. IMHO, all you're asking for is two things that will totally work against you:

1) Loss of interest after about 10 minutes because you're either in the weeds too much and you eventually work you way back to the IT closet you came from

2) That 'one' management component that slightly cared about your teaching tutorial, has an internal epiphany, and now uses their scratch-on-the-surface knowledge to contract all your future ideas, decisions and pitches.

I think it would be your best interest to figure out the cost savings, increased productivity, product improvement, upgrade/growth/implementation strategy, ect. ect. ect. and maybe go back and find out the mission statement you are working for to begin with as well. You seem to only be concerned with getting that new, fancy IT toy at your place of employment and less about how it helps the company that employs you.

I guess if the Indian government wants to talk about censorship and muting of violence, then I vote for them to worry less about about the minors registering on social networks like FB and alike, and more about the ones getting raped on buses in their own country as of late.

It's a bit shallow of me to exploit a circumstance such as that (and certainly not a dig at all from the wonderful Indian community at large), but it's sad what 'Big Machine' irregardless of worldly location will waste their time on. Want to do some cleanup with violence? Start within the confines of your own country boundaries first. Definitely in some need of some human filth policing.

From a Anaconda GUI manual install process, it seems silly to ditch very basic password blackout + back-end entry validation to make sure both password and retype fields match. Was that too much to maintain?

From a Kickstart perspective, I'd say it's even 'less' secure because you can hard-code plain-text useradds in %post, grub passwords, AND more importantly, the root password itself. Not to mention, reveal a boat load about your hardware/network infrastructure that can be a lot more detrimental in the wrong hands or eyes.

...but point taken on both, I'd hope: 1) You're doing the install yourself and if it is a semi-sensitive install and NOT done with prying eyes and 2) from a ks perspective, you practice good filesystem ownership and permissions or satellite/spacewalk access controls.
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All in all, it's shit like this that makes me lose even more faith in the current Fedora maintainers and the Linux distro going forward. Within the last year, things like non-POSIX adoption breeding into packages, lack of security (as mention in article), putting 'all' binaries in/usr/bin because 'we're lazy' approach and negating proper UNIX structure. Plain and simple, a lot of change to fix shit that had a standard, WASN'T broken and thought through LONG ago when most of these 'kids' were playing NES in mom and dad's basement.

adosch (1397357) writes "The Landsat Data Continuity Mission is now in orbit, after launching Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Calif. After about three months of testing, the U.S. Geological Survey will take control and the mission, renamed Landsat 8, will extend more than 40 years of global land observations critical to energy and water management, forest monitoring, human and environmental health, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture."Link to Original Source

We've all been in situations where a new hot dog 'somebody' comes into the workplace, swings the dong around to show their intellect or to make their positional place in their new turf. Put your tenure and title away, along with his/her blunt explanation or criticism of your code for a second and I think what you have to consider is merely a few things:

1) Did he/she make you think about something you didn't consider before or how to handle?

2) Did he/she offer absolutely any real suggestions with proven code that will expand on what you did and make it better?

If it's 'no' to both, then tell that person to piss off. Because it's nothing more than someone wanting to hear themselves speak.

I have this happen to me all the time: People question what you, how do you, why you do, not because there's some sense to 'learn' from your experience, because they are just simpletons who try to be this all-knowing-intellect-goat and 'look good' in front of their peers.

I think if you have a perfect, well-balanced, engineered, methodical and concrete explanation WHY you did something, then I would consider the person's commentary as a fart in the wind and certainly as nothing more than being a typical douche-bag trying to hand out solutions-looking-for-problems.

I've never personally used a rent-to-own service, but I can't imagine it's much fun when your marketed crowd is people who can't afford things outright, then specifically deadbeats who have zero intention of ever buying it and will go to great lengths to try and keep your merchandise.

But there's some shady about this whole story that just doesn't make a lot of sense. Why on earth would a rent-to-own company have a whole development team designing all this for them? I think there was a bit of wrongful intent on the company to want to try and steal some PII; maybe not use it themselves, but sell that information, sure.

Now being tied up with a legal battle, it's now easy for their lawyers to pull out the scapegoat that it was all about protecting their investment and assets. As much as I buy that, that's what the repo-man makes a living for. And if you're losing that many computer assets of non-payment or delinquency, then start selling bottom-line PCs and bring some pimple-faced Best Buy let-go in to oversell and dramatize the hell out of them for you. Or better yet, just stop selling them altogether.